Disentangling the Association of Screen Time With Developmental Outcomes and Well-being

Abstract

Concerns about the association of screen time with myriad developmental, health, and productivity outcomes in children and adolescents date back to the advent of screens themselves. The earliest of these studies was conducted in 1949 as a collaboration between the Columbia Broadcasting System (now known as CBS Corporation) and researchers from Rutgers University.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that having a television increased family cohesion; did not promote viewer passivity; and did not replace other diversions, such as outdoor activities and socializing. 1 Few early television viewers would have imagined the role that screens play in our lives today. The modern age is marked by screen use for accomplishing a wide variety of tasks formerly unrelated to a screen. Talking to someone remotely, looking through magazines, reading a book, managing banking, playing games, and connecting with friends, all discrete activities before the current age, now frequently include some screen interaction. This proliferation of screen-based activities, all broadly accessible through a growing number of electronic devices (eg, mobile or smart phones, personal computers, or smart fashion such as watches or glasses), means that screens occupy a broad swath of daily life for many of us. Understanding the association between new technological affordances and human well-being and productivity outcomes, such as academic performance, is thus highly and perpetually salient.

The Impact of Internet and Social Media Use on Well-Being: A Longitudinal Analysis of Adolescents Across Nine Years

“…In light of the present findings as well as the limitations of this research, we conclude that identifying the exact ways how the use of electronic media impacts adolescents' life is far more challenging than current (primarily cross-sectional, but also longitudinal) analyses suggest (also see, Whitlock & Masur, 2019). First, since average effects seem to be very small, researchers should investigate potentially vulnerable sub-groups of the population who are most likely to suffer from harmful electronic media use (e.g., individuals with extant familial or social problems, low-self-esteem).…”

“…In addition to cross-sectional research, longitudinal studies are needed because they allow to disentangle between-person relationships (i.e., between-person differences in Internet use are related to between-person differences in well-being) from within-person effects (i.e., more frequent Internet use is related to within-person changes in well-being). In particular, scholars have pointed out a scarcity of longitudinal studies that cover longer periods to disentangle between-person and within-person effects (Orben, Dienlin, & Przybylski, 2019;Whitlock & Masur, 2019).…”

The Accuracy and Validity of Self-Reported Social Media Use Measures Among Adolescents

“…In other words, compared to adolescents' digital trace estimates, what are the mean differences in the time adolescents spend using social media measured through retrospective surveys, that is, time spent on social media in a typical week versus in the previous week (RQ1a) and measured through ESM Beyond investigating this between-person validity, it is also important to examine within-person validity. Several scholars have recently called for media effects research that disentangles withinperson and between-person associations (Orben, Dienlin, & Przybylski, 2019;Prinstein, Nesi, & Telzer, 2020;Whitlock & Masur, 2019). Between-person associations and within-person associations focus on different types of research questions and each provide unique insights on media effects (Coyne, Rogers, Zurcher, Stockdale, & Booth, 2020;.…”

The Negative Effect of Smartphone Use on Academic Performance May Be Overestimated: Evidence From a 2-Year Panel Study

“…Aside from diverting attention, device use may also inhibit other cognitive pathways involved in learning, including memory and reward processing (Chen & Yan, 2016; Uncapher & Wagner, 2018; Wilmer, Sherman, & Chein, 2017). However, recent research also emphasizes that the results of studies on the effects of digital-device use might depend heavily on the usage context from which the data are gathered and the subsequent methods of analysis chosen by the researchers (Adelantado-Renau et al, 2019; Orben, Dienlin, & Przybylski, 2019; Orben & Przybylski, 2019; Whitlock & Masur, 2019).…”